Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Build Day 5

Design Review #1

Today was our first design review of the season. The goal of these meetings is to ensure that every member of the team knows the progress of the team and is a able to give design suggestions and improvements. The meeting went long but I think most people got a better understanding of the whole robot concept.

The drive train will be similar to the chassis from last year, but with the wheels dropped slightly to allow us to climb the barrier. It was decided that the drive train needs to slowed down to give us more torque for pushing and also increase the fine control of the chassis.

The shooter will be a pitching machine style shooter. It was determined that priority should be given to making shots form the key because that is where the autonomous shots will be and also it the protected area. One wish feature for the shooter is to be able to shoot from the opposite side of the barrier. We discussed various concepts such as rate of fire of the shooter and how you have to give most pitching style shooters time to regain the speed that's lost from shooting the ball. We are planning on designing a mechanism to change the angle of the shooter.

The collector and ball lift mechanism will allow us to raise the balls from the ground and load them into the shooting wheel. This is going to be one of the key features of the machine because if this jams we are unable to score at all. We are hoping to have a ground to shooter speed of under 2 seconds.

The bridge device will allow us to pull down the bridge so that we can climb on to it. We discussed the possibility of being able to lower the bridge from the raised position with another robot already on the bridge. We determined that this was a situation that wouldn't happen often enough for us to design for it. This device should also assist in preventing us from tipping over as we climb the barrier and bridges.

The controls team will be crucial in making our machine an efficient scorer. We are planning at least eight sensors on this robot, and there will probably be more.

The logistics teams are all working towards their goals of improving and spreading our team brand. Chairman's is working on the first draft of the essay. Our ambassadors team is stating to prepare us for our two regionals and will be reaching our to rookie teams to see how we can improve their season. Media is preparing ideas for various video releases and developing our website.

Today
The design review took up most of the day, but we were still able to test the shooter prototype and complete the prototype pieces for dropping the drive train. The shooter definitely still needs more work, we knew we would be going slow but it was far to slow. We should be able to build a closer to real speed prototype of the shooter by the weekend.